"One of life's minor annoyances is having to wait on my devices to connect to the network after I wake them from sleep. All too often, I'll open the lid on my EeePC netbook, enter a web address, and get the dreaded 'This webpage is not available' message because the machine is still working on connecting to my Wi-Fi network. On some occasions, I have to twiddle my thumbs for as long as 10-15 seconds before the network is ready to be used. The frustrating thing is that I know it doesn't have to be this way. I know this because I have a Mac. When I open the lid of my MacBook Pro, it connects to the network nearly instantaneously. In fact, no matter how fast I am, the network comes up before I can even try to load a web page. My curiosity got the better of me, and I set out to investigate how Macs are able to connect to the network so quickly, and how the network connect time in other operating systems could be improved." Yes, I'd love to have Windows and Linux reconnect as fast as Macs do. Alas, "Method to quickly reconnect to a wireless or wired network", as well as its completely different "Method to quickly reconnect to a wireless or wired network on a mobile device" are probably patented, so Windows and Linux can't reconnect too fast out of fear of violating a software patent. In case you haven't noticed: I'm joking. Sort of.

Yey...another "aren't apple great' post from Thom....this site will be Engadget v.2 before we know it

will we get another update soon on how much he loves his iPad?

Oh come on, you're not even trying! Don't you know it's been passé for a while now to accuse Thom of being an Apple fanboy while trolling? These days you have to pick on his obsession with patents.

To be honest - the machines that most frequently drop off our network for no reason are the apple systems - despite the face we're running an xserve as the primary server.

Your Xserve has zero to do with your network's DHCP unless you're using it as the DHCP server. And if that is the case, you're really doing something wrong to have all your Apple machines drop. I'd take a close look at the the physical and data link layers first. I can't count the times we've had a kinked cable or an accidentally unplugged switch cause havok at work. If you are still having issues after ensuring your network hardware is fine, I'd move to whatever machine (server or router) is providing DHCP and look for the problem there.